First, baiting bigfoot advice for advancing the collective knowledge. Some call it gifting, some call it offerings, few call it baiting as that seems to bump into the realm of hunting. Our opinion is that we doubt it works very well with one exception. The exception is bait in its natural form, forget peanut butter or the nicely laid out paper plate with a variety of healthy snacks. What has worked for us is to find either a current or preferably abandoned orchard, heavy berry patch, or even someone’s home that might have a few hobby fruit trees. That bait they will take, and they will also get pissed if you try active measures to deter said pilfering.

And now on to bigfootery baiting. Every once in a while we tend to find it informative (and yes fun) to stir things a bit, we term it bigfootery baiting. It can be insightful and often yields some interesting reactions, some people go out and play with the squatch, we sometimes play with the squatchers. We placed some very enticing bait out recently and it drew in a few beasts, the reaction was beyond what we expected, but the usual suspects and spins did show up. At this point we will be taking down that post as it served the intended purpose. And while his friends can evidently joke with him about the similarities between himself and Kim Jong, it is racist and terribly inappropriate for others to do so. We do apologize to Bruce Harrington if he took personal offense, those that smelled a chance to draw blood, well, you were had….again. Before we leave this paragraph here is something to chew on, could we be one of those “friends” who joked with him as an agent in place, or even more perversely, could we be a false flag operation? Bigfootery intrigue has more than one example of both, hmmmm.

So what did the bait bring in.? A resident of the Old Domininion who was macho’ly thumping his chest, actually made threats and somehow derived our political views, which resulted in a particularly humorous rant about the leftist. Instead of watching sasquatch in Va., you might want to consider your blood pressure. Maybe your pro wrasslin son could cash the check you want to write, but you? This rant we rate bigfootery silver.

And predictably, someone who loves the drama also grabbed the bait. While her particular rant was less impassioned, it made up with it in terms of inaccuracy and flawed logic. Sorry, bigfootery bronze to you.

All in all a wise investment of our 5 minutes that probably took up hours of their time, on a Saturday none the less. Don’t you people have better things to do on the weekends? Us liberals like to do some protesting, some 57% taking of other’s hard earned money, call some friends on our free cell phones and then drink a latte’. For the dense, see above, that is satire.

So we are removing the bait and calling this particular hunt better than most, almost as good as the one when we darkened the blog for a few days.

We also feel obligated to make the following pronouncement, cross our hearts and hope to die, that ganglian dude is not on our staff, he may contribute comments but we have no way of knowing that for sure. So leave him alone if you can resist the urge to continue with your petty, jealous battles with people who do not agree with your views and toe the company line. We can take a page from someone’s playbook just like you two.

In mobilizing the troops this evening a lament erupted. The lament is that our posts sometimes help the bigfoot carnival barkers strengthen their playbook. We see them mastering the art of pulling the victim card. We see them employing the intellectually dishonest approach of presenting bigfoot “evidence” on their bigfoot website or blog but sayin they are not sayin it is bigfoot and we will let the masses decide. The masses have drank the juice, we and they know how that little swerve works. We see them use the hype machine marketing approach when conference time rolls around, start with something to energize the base early to get that sector committed, then tease out some more, and then drop another hype bomb about two weeks before the big event. We’ve seen it, we’ve reported it, bigfoot carnival barkers have copied it. And sometimes, like today, we see all three get wrapped up in a neat little bigfootery package.

After a few weeks of hyping the event, a picture was published today. Those drunk on the bigfoot punch just sucked it up. We did some studying and think it is hooooo-eeey. And it is not the it’s too good line you sometimes hear. Our issue is it is just not right, it doesn’t pass the smell test.

Why? For starters the field of depth just does not look right for a trail camera, which was the reported device. It literally looks like a bigfoot wedged into a space about as wide as it is. The drama queen also purports to have multiple pictures, so this thing stumbled by a conventional flash trail cam multiple times. As we have said before, bigfoot are like the Amish, no pictures please. We have used them to run em off during OOPS with some success, actually it seems it PO’d em as they trashed the thing. We are calling multiple uses of the carnival barker bigfooter strategems on this one.

A little digging ensued during the meeting, people were dispatched to gather up more info on trail cams and depth of field. What we found:

Most manufacturers will admit that the effective close range of a trail cam is 5′

Most will also admit that inside 10′ one gets a fairly dramatic flash white out. There are new ones that are better, but this picture supposedly is four years old and thus a few evolutions of trail cam technology ago. FWIW a color trail cam was pretty darn expensive back then.

Most trail cams have a fixed focal length of 42 mm. With digital sensors, this means the lense/sensor technology roughly matches that of a conventional 35 mm. This fixed focal length thing is important.

When we put the numbers for the size of the object and the distance to the object, the focal length calculation is well outside the capability of a fixed 42 mm focal length camera.

We started this post days ago and just did not have the time to get back to it. Since that time a possible contender for the suit du jour has appeared, and some back pedaling on it being a trail camera has been issued. It’s now a 35 mm camera with a zoom lens. That story is almost as ridiculous as then you have someone outside, perched higher than the subject in the picture, at night, in relative proximity to a beast using a flash attachment. And there is a claim of multiple pictures.

We are calling bigfootery bull crap on this one. Best explanation is the craving to be adored by this particular DDQ (dysfunctional drama queen) and pre-conference season hype that is right out of our bigfoot carnival barker handbook. Now we have opened the table for the victim card, perhaps a mistake but someone needs to call BS when it is BS. And here’s the best part, they really do not care if it is real or legit because it is about what we mentioned earlier in the paragraph; hype, being a “brave and beloved bigfoot researcher”, gathering some notoriety and putting butts in seats, and telling those butts which seats are where they need to be.

Our predictions: Weeks of new developments, new experts, revealing interviews if she can keep people interested in it and not get blown out by issues with the picture. Perhaps with a guest appearance by the photographer at a paying event.

Either completely ignoring those that are saying BS, or a long, heart-felt essay on how tough it is being a real researcher.

Drama and bigfootery will continue to ensue. And we will lament that we give those too dense to figure it out with a bigfoot carnival barker playbook and tips.

This is what we have been saying for many years. Some get it, some go on the attack.

The Bigfooters Against Lying, Deception, Hoaxing, Intimidation, Cults and Klans has issued the Second Annual Clean-Up Bigfooting Awards. This year’s recipient of the Debunking – Notable Bigfoot Personality Award goes to The Bigfootery Enquirer for their expose of Don Keating’s claimed sighting. The very skilful use of Keating’s own words as he described his claimed encounter, combined with using scientific, provable meteorological facts to show that he had lied not once, but twice, earned this distinction. To have Keating on the record claiming both a timeframe and the moon was full when they proved that it was a new moon that had already set was the best debunking published in the last year. Capturing Keating’s words and the data for posterity via MS Moviemaker was also innovative in our eyes.

Other contenders for the award were Melissa Hovey and her work on the Michigan Recording Project and Steve Kulls for his Biscardi and the frozen bigfoot costume series. In both cases these presentation were lessened by a coloring of vendetta, and in one case culpability was an issue. They do, however, earn a honorable mention.